The Big Short...how soon is too soon?

At first glance the man who gave us such latter day comedy classics as Anchorman and Talledega Nights might be an odd choice for this polemic about the financial crash but Adam McKay has some form in this area. Five years ago I was jolted out of my inattention to his The Other Guys – a pretty routine low comedy as far as I was concerned – by an end credits sequence of savage wit about the state of the US economy after the financial crash of 2008.

The essence of the sequence, which you can see here, is that the rich get rich and the rest get shafted. Anyway this was evidently more than a bee in his bonnet and McKay has gone on to make a film which excoriates the 1% and provides a degree of sardonic comedy along the way. It is now the Oscar front-runner and I think deservedly so simply for standing up and saying what it does. That it also happens to be a dazzling dark comedy is an added bonus.

It’s the accepted wisdom that no one saw the financial crash coming but in fact lots of people did. It wasn’t like a plane crash that genuinely happens without warning, there were lots of signs and quite a few people saw them. In some respects this is like the disaster movie where some Cassandra of a scientist tells everyone the earthquake is coming or the volcano will erupt. Except, unlike the guy in the white coat who is generally the first victim as he heroically attempts to warn others, these guys got obscenely rich.

This is a moral question on which this film comes up, you’ll forgive the expression, short. They see it coming but rather than warn everyone they sit back and make money, all the while marvelling at what everyone else is getting away with.

They make their cash through a process known as ‘shorting’, which is essentially betting against the market. You are betting on a crash which you have seen coming and, despite a brief homily from Brad Pitt about the impact of a crash on ordinary people, they make shedloads of money. It’s a brutal economic instrument which can bring down companies and trash whole economies.

This is the film’s biggest problem; it has no heroes. There is no one you can really root for, we are in a world not of goodies and baddies but baddies and worsies. Our protagonists are no angels, what honour they have comes from at least acknowledging what they’re doing.

But The Big Short isn’t about these guys; hedge fund manager Christian Bale, Wall Street wolf Ryan Gosling, investment boss Steve Carrell, and small time investors Jahn Magaro and Finn Wittrock. It is a film about a corrupt system which relies on the fact that only a few people, in the words of F.Scott Fitzgerald, have the whole equation and they are piling in.

It is a system so corrupt that it is almost impenetrable to the outsider. At one point our unreliable narrator Ryan Gosling breaks the fourth wall to assure us of something we had suspected, that the previous ten minutes is incomprehensible.

The reassurance is the key to The Big Short’s success. The dazzling terminology of the financial sector obscures what everyone does. McKay deals with this very cleverly if simplistically – Margo Robbie in a bubble bath explaining credit default swaps? It’s more entertaining than Robert Peston doing it. But in doing so McKay gets away from what’s happening to concentrate on what’s going on.

The message of the film is simple. These people got away with the crime of the century – any century – and not only were they not held to account, we actually helped them to do it. The only appropriate response to large sections of this film is open-mouthed astonishment at what was going on in plain sight.

That’s why the only appropriate way to tell this story is as a comedy, because sooner or later we realise that the joke was, and continues to be, on us.

Leo is suffering for his art but an Oscar should cure it

It was Alfred, Lord Tennyson who coined the phrase ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’; it occurs in his 1849 requiem In Memoriam A.H.H. and is generally taken to refer to the majestic savagery of the natural world, where primal desire takes precedence over any sentimental consideration.

The phrase came to mind while watching Alejandro Inarritu’s film The Revenant which is very definitely film making, red in tooth and claw. This is a primal experience captured by a cast and crew in similarly primal circumstances and the results are spectacularly manly. This is red-blooded storytelling and red-blooded film making in which Leonardo DiCaprio and others suffer heroically for their art.

The story concerns Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), a frontiersman acting as a guide for a group of trappers in the northern Missouri wilderness of the United States in the early 19^th century. They are attacked by local tribes – a spectacular opening sequence – and forced to flee. While trying to blaze a new trail DiCaprio is attacked and savagely mauled by a grizzly bear.

It seems he will not survive so, rather than delay their escape two of his colleagues – Tom Hardy and Will Poulter – are bribed to stay with him until he dies, and then catch up with the others after giving him a decent burial. Hardy doesn’t want to wait for nature to take its course so he kills DiCaprio and they hightail it for safety.

If that’s all that happened, it wouldn’t be much of a movie. DiCaprio, as it turns out, is not dead. He may be horrifically wounded and hovering at death’s door but he is still alive. Now it is his turn, motivated by the twin primal instincts of survival and revenge, to struggle back to civilisation and take his vengeance.

There’s not a lot of nuance in The Revenant; it is a terrific tale, told exceptionally well and no more than that. The fact that Hugh Glass was a real person simply adds to the awe with which you are inclined to view this. With a little dramatic embellishment, this is a true story; Glass really did travel 600 miles to safety after being left for dead by his companions. The story has been told before in the 1971 film Man in the Wilderness with Richard Harris in the lead.

The abuse and physical damage visited on Glass during the journey is somewhat reflected in DiCaprio’s performance. He is a fine actor but this is very much a plea to the Academy; that of a soul in the wilderness crying out ‘What the hell do I have to do to get an Oscar?’ I suspect his efforts will not go unrewarded.

The real delights of this film are in the craft skills. Inarritu is a superb storyteller and with his tried and trusted cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki he has crafted a compelling and thrilling tale. Shooting entirely in natural light and with marvellous use of negative space Lubezki does a wonderful job of creating a strange and unexplored world where life-threatening hazards lurk at the edge of every frame.

Although it shares a lot with the aforementioned Man in the Wilderness and also Sydney Pollack’s excellent Jeremiah Johnson, which by chance I watched again just a week before seeing this film, The Revenant is still a fine piece of work which deserves all of the honours which are bound to come its way.

Eight down...two to go.

In one of his many excellent books on the film industry the Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman said the easiest word in the Hollywood executive’s vocabulary is ‘No’, so you have to make it as hard as possible for them to give that answer. On that basis we must assume that Quentin Tarantino has never heard the word, or else why would we have films like The Hateful Eight.

Here are some, but not all, of the questions to which someone sensible should have answered in the negative at some stage in the proceedings.

Can I make a film in 70mm, a limited format so archaic no one uses it anymore? Can I make a film in that widescreen format and then perversely set most of it indoors? Can I make a movie that is so long it has zero chance of getting your money back? Can I do a film version of Agatha Christie? Can I write a script so shoddy and self-indulgent I have to pop up to explain it to the audience? Can I write scenes so long that Panavision has to make special magazines to hold enough film to shoot them? Can I suggest a false moral equivalency between sexism and racism? And finally, am I entitled to whine like a child because my film opens against Star Wars and most people want to see that?

If you get a yes to all of these questions then the resulting film better be Citizen Kane, but for all the fuss surrounding it The Hateful Eight for me is a pointless exercise in directorial vanity. The story is essentially And Then There Were None with a bunch of characters of varying degrees of unsavoriness trapped in a remote location by a blizzard. Sooner or later the tension is going to get to them and the body count mounts.

Tarantino sets his stall out fairly early in the proceedings. The stage in which bounty hunter Kurt Russell is transporting his fugitive, Jennifer Jason Leigh, to town is stopped first by rival bounty hunter Samuel L. Jackson, and then by Walton Goggins who claims to be the new sheriff of the town they are headed to. Within seconds Leigh drops the ‘N’ bomb referring to Jackson earning her a savage beating from Russell. This is repeated several times in the film by which stage the ‘B’ bomb is liberally applied in reference to Leigh. The brutality, humiliation, and indignity visited upon Leigh in the film is breath-taking but the argument seems to be that it’s okay to be misogynist because at least you are not being racist. I’m just going to leave that thought there.

Once they arrive at the staging post they meet a bunch of others trapped by the weather and from this point on all pretence at cinema disappears. Robert Richardson is for my money one of the best cinematographers in the business; the opening shots of this film are beautiful and must look glorious in 70mm. However once you are indoors, where most of the story unfolds, it’s wasted; this is essentially filmed theatre, albeit Jacobean but still theatre.

Tarantino has never been much of a storyteller. He is a writer of great scenes but has difficulty transforming those into a coherent narrative. Perhaps the best scene he ever wrote was the opening conversation in Inglorious Basterds between Christoph Waltz and the French farmer; that scene crackled with tension, suspense, and possibility. The rest of the film; not so much, to use one of the anachronisms Tarantino shoe-horns into The Hateful Eight. However in this film he seems even to have forgotten how to write a good scene; most of them are flabby, fatuous and incredibly self-indulgent for both actors and directors. The consequence being that when you stitch all of these scenes together you get a three-hour film that collapses under its own weight.

This is no one’s fault but the director’s. On a broader view I think the issue is that Tarantino’s creative well has run dry. He is a formidable repository of trash culture. In previous films he has successfully – let’s say ‘homaged’ although less kind words come to mind – material from great directors and famous genres. Now however he has done all of that and the only references he has left are his own.

It’s not so much a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes more of the Emperor’s Striptease; he’s been shedding garments for a couple of films now and there’s not much left by this stage. This is a Tarantino movie that has to rely on his own tropes; long scenes, lengthy exposition delivered by people with mortal injuries, moments that exist merely to shock like a child swearing in polite company. As such it falls flat.

It’s too long, the performances are generally pretty poor – is it just me or does Jackson start channelling pantomime dames when he appears in Tarantino movies – and the end result is just plain dull with spectacular moments of violence to jolt you awake from time to time.

Tarantino says he will only make another two movies. Let’s just hope no one says no to that suggestion.